Make more money with the Step-Up Process for freelancers.
This is a simple but powerful process, ignored or invisible to most freelancers.
We tend to get used to a certain level of income. We know what we can expect from a certain kind of job. We have $500 jobs and $5,000 jobs.
One week we’ll finish a $5,000 assignment, and the next we’ll start on a smaller, $500 job.
This is our comfort zone. These are the lower and upper limits of our work.
Mostly we get jobs priced somewhere in between the two. We don’t like to take on jobs for less than the lower amount, and we don’t expect to get work priced higher than our typical upper limit.
The figures may be different for you, but perhaps you recognize the pattern.
If so, try to adjust your thinking.
Look at the jobs priced at the upper limit, and ask yourself a couple of questions:
1. Could I find ways to expand those projects, add more value, and charge even more?
2. How can I find more work like that, and what kind of project would earn me double that amount?
All too often we view our typical upper limit as being the ceiling on what we deserve. “It’s great when I get projects like that, but it doesn’t happen very often!”
Think differently. Discard any sense you have that there as any ceiling beyond which you don’t deserve anything bigger or better.
Instead, when you get the big jobs, tell yourself, “THIS is where I belong. This is the kind of work I should get all of the time. This is my new baseline.”
Part of the process of stepping up from one level of income to another is to stop looking at the biggest income earning as being an anomaly. Look upon them as the new norm. If you did it once, you can do it again and again.
All too often we have a median project value of about $2,000, for example. When we get that $5,000 job we view it as an exception. We step back down to where we feel we belong.
Don’t do that. In fact, when the next $500 job comes along, refuse it. Take the time you would spend on that job and use it to look for another $5,000 job.
Don’t step back down to your median earnings. Step up to the next level of earnings. View your most profitable assignment of the year as your next step up. But not the last step.
This is a head game you have to play with yourself. But you need to do it, because for most of us, the default head game that loops around and around in our minds actually holds us down.
You need to break that loop and step up.
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